Wiki Graffiti

I've been suffering lately from Wiki spammers on the AxKit wiki. The spammers are simply adding links in to their porn pages to get a higher google pagerank.

I do not like this one bit. But what can I do?

The surprising thing is that they are actually adding the links in POD format. So someone is either already a perl programmer, or taking the time to learn the format to add the links in. And it's obviously not automated.

The worst thing is that the AxKit wiki maintains a linked in history, so even when I revert the change the spammer still has those links in place in the history view.

One possible solution is to require a login. But I hate that idea. Another possible solution is to show the raw content in the history view (i.e. raw POD) so that links aren't links. But that doesn't mean I stop having the job of janitor.

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instead of linking directly to external URLs have your formatter point them to a redirect script thus negating the Google value of the links. if the spammers are adding links by hand they'll figure it out quickly.

Ah, thanks for this idea. This is the option I've chosen (as it's the simplest to implement). I wrote a little redirector that makes sure the referrer contains one of my domains (to stop email/spam use) and now all external links go through that.

I also added a page for porn spammers to go and read, and added it to all the "Edit" screens so hopefully they will go and read it.

Several of the Wikis that I run are set up for public viewing, but require a login to edit. One of these Wikis has been up for four years, and I've received exactly one (mild) complaint.

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One of the Wikis is for the AYE Conference [ayeconference.com], a no-vendor people issues in technology conference put on by a group of consultants and software managers that Gerald (Jerry) Weinberg has trained.We use the Wiki to gather feedback and suggestions about the conference sessions. Folks who register get a login and can contribute; everyone else can read along.
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Once upon a time when I worked in the SEO business I wrote some code which auto submitted anyone who added an url to google's spam report http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html [google.com] Worked quite nicely as a trap for our competitors. You could probably add something similar quite easily.